Archive for the ‘Gore Theory’ Category

Al Gore Might Yet Join 2008 Contenders
Former Vice President Keeps Mum
As His Movie Sparks Talk of a White House Run
By JACKIE CALMES
May 8, 2006; Page A4

First there was Clinton-Gore. Could Clinton vs. Gore be next?

For former Vice President Al Gore, a rash of favorable publicity surrounding this month’s opening of his movie “An Inconvenient Truth,” and the growing political resonance of its subject — global warming — are stoking the most serious speculation about a Gore political comeback since his loss in the 2000 U.S. presidential election.

In 2008, that could mean a once-unimaginable battle for Democrats’ nomination between Bill Clinton’s former vice president and his wife, Hillary Clinton. To some pro-Gore Democrats, worried about Mrs. Clinton’s electability, that is part of the appeal.

“I appreciate that buzz, but he’s not running for president,” insists Michael Feldman, a former vice presidential adviser who is helping promote the film and Mr. Gore’s new book on which it is based. “He has been spending a considerable amount of time trying to educate people about the issue of global warming,” and won’t talk about politics “right now,” Mr. Feldman says.

The demurrals aren’t persuasive to some Democrats, including former Clinton-Gore White House insiders. “I do know that he’s thinking about it. I know for a fact,” a former adviser says. “He’s talked to people about the pros and cons.”

Among those said to be pushing Mr. Gore are billionaire venture capitalist and high-tech entrepreneur John Doerr and Laurie David, a global-warming activist and producer of the film, and wife of “Seinfeld” and “Curb Your Enthusiasm” creator Larry David. “When people see this movie, I know they’re going to see the real Al Gore, and they’re going to demand that he run,” Ms. David says. But, she adds, he changes the subject whenever it comes up, and had to be talked into making the movie when she pitched it.

Mr. Gore has begun assembling a Nashville, Tenn.-based operation to help with the demands on his time. He has hired longtime friend and top aide Roy Neel to head the office, and environmental activist Kalee Kreider, from a Washington public-relations firm, to handle communications. Mr. Feldman says their work will focus on global warming, not on maneuvering for 2008.

Yet the talk of a political second act for the man who won the 2000 popular vote, but lost in the Electoral College after a U.S. Supreme Court ruling, exceeds anything before 2004, when Mr. Gore could have sought a grudge match against President Bush.

In recent weeks, he has been on the covers of Vanity Fair, Wired (its headline: “The Resurrection of Al Gore”) and American Prospect, a liberal Democratic magazine. Defeated politically, he nonetheless makes Time’s list of the world’s 100 most influential people; Mr. Gore is featured under the headings “Heroes and Pioneers” and “America Takes a Fresh Look at ‘Ozone Man'” — the derisive nickname coined by the first President Bush in 1992 after Mr. Gore’s previous environmental book, “Earth in the Balance,” came out.

“His star will never be higher than it is right now with his movie coming out,” says Democratic consultant Karen Skelton, Mr. Gore’s former political director.

The Gore buzz reflects a sense among even some pro-Clinton Democrats that Mrs. Clinton, considered the prohibitive favorite for the nomination given her support in the party’s base of activists and donors, can’t win the general election because she is a polarizing figure to many voters. These skeptics believe only someone such as Mr. Gore with the celebrity and fund-raising potential to match Mrs. Clinton could stop her.

Like Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Gore remains a negative figure to many voters, says a Democrat who has seen private polls. For both, that might only increase with the spectacle of a Clinton-Gore brawl. Even insiders can’t fully account for the bad blood that has built up since. At bottom, they say, it reflects contrasting views of what cost Mr. Gore the 2000 election: Mr. Clinton’s scandals, or Mr. Gore’s decision to so fully separate himself from a president who remained popular amid peace and prosperity. Several insiders say Mr. Gore is more likely to run if Mrs. Clinton does than if she doesn’t.

Also controversial among Democrats was Mr. Gore’s 2004 endorsement of Howard Dean, now the Democratic Party chief, just as Mr. Dean was stumbling in his presidential primary race against the ultimate nominee, Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry. Mr. Kerry also is considering another run in 2008, though he, like Mr. Gore, would have the taint of a loser for partisans craving a fresh face.

According to Mr. Feldman and others, Mr. Gore is enjoying his freer and more lucrative life as a private citizen. “My expectation is he’s not going to run in 2008,” says Tad Devine, a top Gore strategist in 2000 who hasn’t spoken with him lately. “He’s in a really good place, and he’s succeeding fabulously. Why would he want to walk away from it all?”

Mr. Gore and his wife, Tipper, have a new home in an affluent Nashville area, and they recently bought a condominium in San Francisco, nearer to two daughters in California. Since conceding to Mr. Bush, he has taught at several universities and written two books with his wife. He is on Apple Computer Inc.’s board and is senior adviser to Google Inc. He has founded Current, a youth-oriented, interactive cable network, and Generation Investment Management, which invests in companies deemed environmentally and socially responsible.
[Gore Graphic]

Periodically he has spoken out against Mr. Bush on the environment, Iraq and alleged abuses of executive power, in speeches promoted by the liberal group MoveOn.org. And he has widely given the 90-minute lectures and computer slide shows on global warming that, for all his reputed stiffness, gave rise to a film that drew standing ovations at the Sundance Film Festival.

On stage and in the film, a deadpan Mr. Gore opens, to laughs and applause: “I am Al Gore. I used to be the next president of the United States of America.”

Mr. Gore, who turns 60 in 2008, could remain noncommittal and enter the presidential fray late, given his fame and fund-raising potential — unlike lesser-known Democrats already stumping in the early-nominating states to be the Clinton alternative, such as former Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina, former Virginia Gov. Mark Warner, Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack, and Indiana Sen. Evan Bayh. If Mr. Gore ran — or were drafted, as Ms. David suggests — the longtime Washingtonian would run as an outsider, Democrats expect, helped along by his relationship with Internet-savvy MoveOn.org activists.

There would be no small irony in Mr. Gore re-emerging with a crusade against global warming. In 2000, he played down the issue he had so long been identified with in Congress, on his consultants’ advice. They feared the younger Bush, like his father, would use the issue to reinforce an image of Mr. Gore as a bloodless wonk, and make it a jobs question for voters in swing industrial and coal-mining states. “The campaign took this issue off the table and robbed him of seeming ‘big’ and visionary,” says former Clinton White House Chief of Staff John Podesta. “I think he regrets that.”

WHERE do Democratic presidential candidates end up? The answer, to judge from recent headlines, is that they go to global gabfests in posh skiing resorts. Al Gore was at Sundance the other week with the likes of Robert Redford, Paris Hilton and various film people who claim they are interested in “issues”. John Kerry was at Davos with the likes of Kofi Annan, Angelina Jolie and sundry slobbering journalists. The skiing was excellent in both places, we’re told; the networking was AU POINT; and the opportunities for meeting HOI POLLOI, other than as conveyors of drinks and canapes, just about zero.

It is easy to be cynical about the keenness of Messrs Gore and Kerry to discuss “the creative imperative” and other such tosh with their peers. After all, these are men cut from the same cloth, who have spent most of their life hobnobbing with whatever passes for the elite, even occasionally marrying them. They were both bred to be politicians. Mr Gore became a congressman at the age of 28, a senator at 36 and a presidential candidate at 39. Mr Kerry, who grew up thinking that the fact that his initials were JFK proved that he was destined for high office, was a leader of the anti-war movement at 27 (Richard Nixon charitably described him as a “phoney”, but an “effective” one).

And yet something extraordinary has happened over the past few years: the two men have started to become distinguishable. Mr Kerry remains a professional politician–the perpetual junior senator for Massachusetts, playing the pale thin man to Teddy Kennedy’s florid fat man. Conversely, he has also retained his tin ear for politics. Last week, he not only made the mistake of calling for a filibuster of Samuel Alito that had no chance of succeeding (to have any chance of making this archaic senatorial device work with a Supreme Court nominee, you first need to have demonised your victim); he also made the mistake of making that call from Davos.

From the perspective of Davos Man, this was doubtless an impressively global stunt (how Ms Jolie must have purred on the chairlift). But in the real world of American politics, it was disastrous. Scott McClellan, George Bush’s normally lacklustre press secretary, joked about it being “pretty serious yodelling to call for a filibuster from a five-star ski resort in the Swiss Alps”. The WALL STREET JOURNAL sniped that Mr Kerry had been “communing with his political base” in Davos. Democrats were furious. They saw it as a transparent play for support from the party’s over-excited activists, the insider turned calculating insurgent (Mr Kerry even wrote about the filibuster on a left-wing blog). Barack Obama, a newcomer to the Senate, said it was silly to oppose a nominee unless you’ve won the hearts and minds of the country. Mr Alito has now been confirmed for the Supreme Court, blue-collar America has been reminded why Democrats are not like them and Mr Kerry has confirmed his position as one of the perennial losers in American politics.

Mr Gore, by contrast, has morphed into a more interesting figure. The youngest presidential candidate from a major party since William Jennings Bryan, he has now abandoned the life of a professional politician for a portfolio career as part-time businessman and part-time tub-thumper. He calculates that he spends three-quarters of his time running his cable television project, Current TV, a sort of “Wayne’s World” for the digital age. Mockers may point out that most of Mr Gore’s original backers were big Democratic donors, that he had to give up his original idea of founding a liberal alternative to Fox News and that the channel now relies on help from Mr Gore’s political nemesis, Rupert Murdoch. But Current TV has developed into a genuine business rather than a political front.

It is ironic that a man who was once famous for his stiffness has embraced one of the most fluid forms in media; and rather odd that a man who was robbed of a normal youth by his father’s political ambition (the older Senator Gore boasted of raising his son for the White House) has plunged into youth television. But he has loosened up. Al the politician was wound up almost beyond endurance. (“How can you tell Al Gore from a roomful of Secret Service agents?”, went a popular joke. “Gore is the stiff one.”) The new Al is letting it all hang out. The evidence of this is partly physical: a man who was described as a “fantasy man” by FITNESS magazine in 1992 has ballooned. But it is more than that: Mr Gore is now quite a performer, a man who is no longer frightened of sweating and hollering.

LET IT ALL OUT, AL
Mr Gore now delivers no-holds-barred broadsides against the Bush administration for everything from Abu Ghraib to warrantless wiretaps. But the former vice-president is at his most impressive on his old passion–the environment. Wrongly or rightly, Mr Gore believes that humanity has only about a decade to fix a “planetary emergency”; and he has spent the past few years roaming the world perfecting his lecture-cum-slideshow on the dangers of global warming, much as Ronald Reagan spent the 1950s roaming America perfecting his speech on the evils of government. Mr Gore was at Sundance to promote a documentary based on his speech.

Which points to an interesting paradox: Mr Gore is generating far more political capital by breaking the political rules than he did by obeying them. Mr Kerry’s Alito ploy looked brazenly political. But Mr Gore’s new persona (or perhaps, more accurately, his rediscovery of his hidden self) is causing something of a buzz. The party’s cash-rich Hollywood wing increasingly sees him as a liberal alternative to Hillary Clinton; and he is persuading all sorts of people to take a fresh look at Dudley Do Right. None of this means that he is a frontrunner for the Democratic nomination in 2008. But it does mean that he is far better placed than the junior senator from Massachusetts.

STOCKHOLM, Sweden — Former Vice President Al Gore (search) said Wednesday he had no intention of ever running for president again.”I have absolutely no plans and no expectations of ever being a candidate again,” said Gore, who lost the 2000 election to President Bush (search).

However, Gore did not completely shut the door to political endeavors.

“I don’t completely rule out some future interest, but I don’t expect to have that,” he said during a visit to Swede

I have told this story a number of times, and I just now actually wrote it well for a Billikens.com post. So I will post it here too….

Everyone thinks that Gore is an out-there choice for 2008, and it may be…But, I think we should look at the following before we necessarily rule him out.

Candidate A and Candidate B are running for President in #. Candidate B is the current VP. Candidate B struggles with being in the shadow and the impact of his popular predecessor (the current President who he is VP to). Candidate A wins with the help of a very contested election in State Z. Administration A (Candidate A) is immensely unpopular early in his term. There is a national crisis which Administration A handles well. Administration A is popular. Administration A starts getting significantly involved in a war abroad. Administration A suffers national tragedy. Administration A rides that sympathy/sentiment to re-election defeating a “poor choice” in Candidate B’s party in election #+4.

Meanwhile, Candidate B suffers in the public eye. However, he starts reshaping his image over the years.

Administration A suffers politcally because of the war they got involved in. The American people don’t see an end to the war. Candidate B decides to run for president again. Candidate B makes a comeback citing the good times of old when he was VP. Candidate B wins this time in November #+8.
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Now…Who’s story is this? It isn’t a prediction of the future…It happened. Here is the story again, with names.
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John Kennedy (Candidate A) and Richard Nixon (Candidate B) are running for President in 1960 (#). Nixon is the current VP. Nixon struggles with being in the shadow and the impact of his popular predecessor, Eisenhower (the current President who he is VP to). Kennedy wins with the help of a very contested election in Illinois (State Z). Kennedy (Administration A (Candidate A)) is immensely unpopular early in his term (Bay of Pigs). There is The Cuban Missile Crisis (national crisis which Kennedy Administration (Administration A) handles well. Kennedy Administration (Administration A) is popular. Kennedy Administration (Administration A) starts getting significantly involved in Vietnam, a war, abroad. Kennedy Administration (Administration A) suffers national tragedy (JFK’s Assasination). Johnson Adminstration (Administration A) rides that sympathy/sentiment to re-election defeating a “poor choice” in Republican (Candidate B’s) party in 1964 (#+4).

Meanwhile, Richard Nixon (Candidate B) suffers in the public eye (Losing Gubernatorial Race in California). However, he starts reshaping his image over the years.

Johnson Administration (Administration A) suffers politcally because of Vietnam (the war they got involved in). The American people don’t see an end to the war. Richard Nixon (Candidate B) decides to run for president again. Richard Nixon (Candidate B) makes a comeback citing the good times of old (gotta love the ’50s) when he was VP. Richard Nixon (Candidate B) wins this time in 1968.

Now, let’s apply this to some more modern settings.
George W. Bush (Candidate A) and Al Gore (Candidate B) are running for President in 2000. Al Gore (Candidate B) is the current VP. Al Gore (Candidate B) struggles with being in the shadow and the impact of his popular predecessor, Bill Clinton (the current President who he is VP to). Bush (Candidate A) wins with the help of a very contested election in Florida (State Z). The Bush Adminstration (Administration A (Candidate A)) is immensely unpopular early in his term. There is 9/11 (a national crisis) which the Bush Adminstration (Administration A) handles well. Bush Administration (Administration A) is popular. The Bush Administration (Administration A) starts getting significantly involved in Iraq (a war abroad). Bush Adminstration (Administration A) suffers national tragedy (Still Riding 9/11, War on Terror, and Iraq (i.e. Getting Saddam). Administration A rides that sympathy/sentiment to re-election defeating a “poor choice” in Gore’s (Candidate B’s) party in election 2004 (#+4).

Meanwhile, Al Gore (Candidate B) suffers in the public eye (The Beard Phase, the Liberalness, Endorsing Dean). However, he starts reshaping his image over the years. (Anyone see that nice article about Katrina & Gore?)

Bush Administration (Administration A) suffers politcally because of the war they got involved in. The American people don’t see an end to the war. Al Gore (Candidate B) decides to run for president again. Al Gore (Candidate B) makes a comeback citing the good times of old (gotta love the ’90s) when he was VP. Al Gore (Candidate B) wins this time in November 2008 (#+8).
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